Alias Wavefront Maya

[Bonny Battaglino]

Im currently on the job hunt and have been refining my technical skills via tutorials on Lynda.com with student trials of programs to address my own perceived deficiencies. I've had decent academic experience in Rhino, and am now moving on to Maya mainly because of personal interest in both as modeling tools. Having only completed a small "Introductory Essentials" tutorial I'm already starting to see quite a few similarities between the two (especially with Nurbs modeling).

What I'm curious to know is what are the main differences between the two (in a 3d modeling way; I'm going to disregard the points of true animation as I don't see myself diving into that at all in the near future). Like I said, it seems that the two operate in much the same fashion but I'm willing to bet that there are major differences between the two that my beginner's eye isn't seeing (yet). I'd be very happy if people on the forum would give their personal opinions/experiences on when, why and what they would use in specific situations so that I'm better to able to assess what direction I want to take my skills in.

I used Maya throughout my entire academic architecture program - except for my last quarter when I switched to Revit. at any rate - the marking menu system acts as a heads down display for all user functions - between that and the custom right click menus I was very fast - had to be worked ful-ltime as a Maya artist for Rockstar games and full time architecture student - only way to do it was with Maya - It has a great renderer and you can use animation to show how a building comes together.

maya was bought by autodesk in 2005. that was the beginning of the end for them. i'm guessing that's the reason there haven't been any posts since 2009 (the last 4 years there were just wishful thinking on the poster's part).

YUP they ruined it - I just used Maya 2012 recently and gave up on it - I can model better in Revit with the concept modeler than I used to be able to in Maya 7 back in the Alias Wavefront day. Autodesk might have jacked it up on purpose.

Ah right Xenakis, I forgot you were the ex-Rockstar workhorse. Maybe you can shed a bit more light for me on the best methods of choosing how to model in Maya vs. Rhino; I've come from a background pretty much based entirely around SketchUp for 3d; I've realized the deficiencies for a while now but being in the middle of senior undergraduate year I wasn't very intent on rocking the boat by spending too much time trying to learn new software.

I'm currently teaching myself Revit as well through the same website, since almost every firm I've spoken to in the last 6 months has asked for experience in that. I understand you've also had a significant amount of experience in that and was wondering what kind of compatibility issues or preferences you've found in transitioning between Maya/Rhino and Revit, and how that plays into your professional work post-academia? My intent is to work largely in Rhino for my M.Arch (been accepted, deferred to next September).

The way I'm starting to see it now is that Rhino + Grasshopper is getting closer to what Maya does as a single program, minus the movie-making ability, is this correct? I'm starting to wonder if this would mean that Greg Lynn, had Rhino + Grasshopper been available at that point in time, given the choice may have chosen that over the intense focus on Maya?

BenC - pretty much - you can write .mel scripts in Maya do do a lot of procedural stuff in many ways like grasshopper - if you know some of the basics of programming .mel is like C# - also Maya has renderers - I would look at Maya

i used to be a huge advocate of using maya, mostly because MEL is so powerful and quick sketches take no time, but if you're running rhino 5, it basically out-performs maya given equal mastery if your intent is eventual fabrication.

BenC asked about what the differences are between both platforms, not which one is better. No one cares which one more firms use, or which one creates more mindblowing work. Differences are (just for example, these might not be correct)

You have edit point and control point curves for object creation - these features I have found to be easier to use than in Rhino - also you have some decent renderers as well. - also the UI in Maya is easier to use with it's marking menus - properly set up is like a heads down display on a fighter.

The main issue I'm coming into over and over is the fact that both Rhino AND Maya can model in NURBS and Polygons. Frankly, in Rhino I don't think I'd actually spend much time in poly because it doesn't feel like the way the software was intended to work - its more of an after-thought when transferring the model to CNC/3d print applications. Maya seems to be the opposite but with less accuracy in the creation due to an odd lack of units (they look like they're in there, but just as an afterthought). This keeps leading me to believe that Maya really wouldn't be used in the professional architectural world precisely because the software is tailored towards game/character development, where measurements have a lot more to do with proportions and relations to other parts of the body/model.

I've got a tendency to lean towards Rhino, which I'm guessing has a lot to do with the fact that I've already had academic experience with it. I'm mostly trying to figure out why I would use Maya instead of this, and how the two relate to each other. I appreciate the responses so far.

Its entirely on my own interest/intuition. I've never met anyone from Autodesk, and on the flip side I've also never really had any firms request it in job applications (seems to be all Revit/Cad/SU/CS). In my senior at school I became really interested in pushing myself in Rhino and the power it has in modeling, enough that I plan to use it as my go-to software for my Masters. As I'm in the midst of a year (or two) off between undergrad and grad school I've just been trying to expand my perspective of the software available to me. I knew of Maya before but never had the opportunity to start exploring it until now; and now that Ive been able to test it out I'm starting to wonder if its worth it. I've had a side interest in animation art (I took a studio art minor, which included a simple animation course) and thought it may be a door to keep open (via Maya) as I move through my academics.

i don't think there are really that many openings in the video game industry. plus the turn-around, even if you get a job modelling for a video game company there is a fair chance you'll be let go after their single title ships. plus, isn't epic the only company left that uses maya? i would put time into learning 3ds max instead (or stick with rhino, or learn revit).

alias wavefront owned maya before autodesk, so alias and maya should be the same program, just updated. the job posting i had about the fourth post from the top, rockstar is now looking for people with 3ds max experience. they may sill use maya, but it seems odd they wouldn't include that in a job posting. they also ask for the ability to grasp new programs, but i still think it would be odd for them to ask for experience in max if they use maya. you left rockstar as maya was heading towards it's death bed. honestly, i think autodesk bought both maya and xsi with the intent of killing them. their development efforts are almost solely focused on revit with a bit towards 3ds max; everything else is just enough attention to sell a new copy every year.

zynga sucks in about every way something could suck. that would be like working at EA. they make flash games (i suppose it's javascript now) for facebook. if you aspire to work there, i would think they use illustrator more than any 3d program.

Maya 2012 - when you lift up the hood(Autodesk generic Ribbon UI) Maya is just as Alias left it - Autodesk just piled their crappiola on top - I had to spend 10 minutes turning it all off before I could use it - then I went back to Revit and used their concept modeler to do what I was going to do in Maya.

I'm just wondering why Max has achieved dominance despite being, from what I can tell, no easier or harder overall for a visualisation workflow? What caused it to achieve the feedback-loop critical mass of plugins, models, tutorials and users?

I can understand people using Houdini for particle fx, Maya for rigging and animation, etc etc, but in a field where all things appear to be equal between the two stablemates (Max and Maya) it's something I've always wondered (and chafed over due to having to muck around to get assets designed for Max into Maya!)

It's probably the all-purpose agenda Max has always been written on. Max was first issued by a company called Discreet until Autodesk bought it. AD guys must have seen a great tool in it. And likewise happened with Maya, which recently became part of the Autodesk family. I'm not familiar with Maya at all so I can't tell you where it really excells Max but generally speaking, each application must have a trend of power over it's piers. Maybe Max proved better and grew up faster and became this way more popular.

There were other programs out there like Strata, Impulse's Imagine, Lightwave, Alias Wavefront. Max's tie to AutoCad was a huge advantage. But there's also an urban myth that companies were making it easy (encouraging?) for their software to be copied/pirated so that it would become the de facto standard. If everybody was learning XYZ software then companies were more prone to use it because the work/talent pool consisted mostly of people who knew XYZ. The hiring companies were more scrupulous so the software company still made money.

and rest everything Josef said above is good, just to add that 3D Studio (on dos) was developed by a group called yost group till version 4 (and upto 4.2, if I am correct) before being bought over by the BIG A and transferred to kinetix. just my 2 c.

Even the 3ds DOS efforts of the Yost Group was completely an Autodesk endevour. Gary Yost was hired by Autodesk in 1987 to develop 3DS Dos. He (and some of other well known 3ds developers) developed 3d tools for the Atari ST previous this

3a8082e126